Liturgical images and movements that speak to experience

This site is a liturgical resource helping worship planners to ground ritual experience in traditional images and symbols, used in old and new ways to engage body, mind and spirit. We need embodied signs, as the Act of Thanksgiving below attests. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions or insights on this liturgical theme.

blessings, Fr. Michael

NOTE: THIS IS NOT an on-line community or social networking site.

Known In Our Midst

Good and gracious God, we acknowledge you as present in our midst, and we give you glory.

Through deeds of power, wonders and signs you have made yourself know.Through water and wind and flame and oil, you sustain and inspire and cleanse and renew.Through created things you call us into being and draw us into a conscious relationship with you.

Out of our past signs emerge that tell us you are near:­– the ascension of incense, sign of an offering found pleasing in your sight;- the appearance of rainbows, reminders of your covenant and care;– a lamb’s blood smeared on our doors, assurances of your favor and protection;– pillars of fire and tablets of stone, leading us on a path of right relationship and peace;– the covenant ark and sacred mount, footstools of your holiness, places of mercy and justice and glory revealed.

In life’s cycles of dying and rising we see your work:– the death of a seed that leads to life more abundant; a handful of grain, crushed to become one in the baking;– a single loaf, broken, consumed, that we might be one in the sharing;– a community of stories, pondered and retold that we might be one in the remembering;– a Lamb’s blood smeared on a cross, a single life broken in selfless love that we might be one through his offering;– and ourselves, too, broken and shared that all might be one in the loving and living and serving and giving.

In our humanness we need embodied signs.Like two lovers who can’t express the depth of their love without touch;so we yearn to receive your Son’s most precious body and blood, that we might become one with you in a physical, tangible way.Yet, so boundless and merciful is your love for usthat you give us a world of ways to feel your presence in our midst.

Satisfy the longing of our hearts as we travel life’s road, and bring us again to the joy of your intimate embrace, both now and at that heavenly feast at which all shall be welcomed and all shall be truly one with you, Source of all Being, Eternal Word and Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen.